Everything that disappears in the Bermuda Triangle… Well, this is where they end up.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

(2013)

Thor Freudenthal’s half-hearted sequel to Chris Columbus’ 2010 sub-Harry Potter Young Adult adaptation reeks of a budget-strapped follow-up. Movies that don’t feel the urge to hit the two-hour finish line are fine by me, but when the quest for Golden Fleece is a one-stop shop it’s clear something has gone seriously awry somewhere. While there are a couple of sprightly elders livening up the supporting roles, Sea of Monsters mostly fails to pass muster, even stood next to its slight but likeable predecessor.

Reputedly costing less than The Lightning Thief, the bean counters obviously decided it made financial sense based on that movie’s post-theatrical earnings. That is, it got made by the skin of its teeth. Everyone is looking for the next Potter, then the next Twilight and now the next Hunger Games. Percy Jackson takes its cues of destiny’s child from Potter, along with the assorted sidekicks/ mentor types, but it also hearkens to Chronicles of Narnia in its overt references to religion/mythology (Christianity, the Greek pantheon). Narnia also scraped together a (second) sequel based on long-term maths rather than instant benefits after Prince Caspian floundered.

So Sea of Monsters has to make do with a director of a mid-range comedies (Hotel for Dogs, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and the loss of the entirety of the adult cast of Lightning Thief (so no Brosnan, Bean, McKidd. Thurman, Dawson or Coogan). Anthony Head fills in comfortably for Brosnan as Chiron, a Rupert Giles-type professor with four hooves. Stanley Tucci makes one of his dazzling cameos as Mr D (did they think calling him Dionysus would be too potent a signifier of debauchery?), perpetually attempting to fill a glass of fine wine only for it to transform to water before he is able to drink a drop (at Zeus’ decree). He also has a winningly disreputable taste for stealing ideas and palming them off as his own. Nathan Fillion cameos as Hermes, the father of the not-that-threatening-really returning bad teen Luke (Jake Abel, who gets the occasional decent line delivery, ”What are you doing? Don’t walk on my roof!” but lacks a sense of genuine menace). Fillion, still eating all the pies, is content to dine out on the decade old memory of Firefly (Hercules Busts Heads; “The best TV show ever, so, of course, cancelled”).

The adult support aside, it’s Brandon T Jackson as satyr Grover who yet again steals the show (it’s questionable why no one comments on satyrs being naked from the waist down, centaurs too; is it only because there’s a lot of hair concealing their bits?). When he’s not off screen and captured, that is. He disappears for a long period, but instantly reaps the laughs when he resurfaces disguised as a lady Cyclops. Logan Lerman has an open-faced guilelessness that could prove irritating if he wasn’t also a decent actor. He isn’t especially well-served by Percy, a strictly predictable role of good-natured heroism fuelled by a ready supply of platitudes. Not helping matters is the introduction of his sub-Ted “Theodore” Logan half-brother, Tyson (Douglas Smith); he’s a dozy but brave dread-head Cyclops. Alexandra Daddio returns as Annabeth (the Hermione role), Athena’s daughter) while Leven Rambin is Clarisse, a headstrong and haughty half-daughter of Ares. These bastard offspring are rendered quite innocuous by the dedicatedly unremarkable storytelling.

Any given high point of Greek mythology is ironed into anodyne shape, complete with strange connections between given legends presumably decided by pulling names out of a hat. Luke plans to resurrect the Titan Kronos, father of Zeus (a victim of mass patricide, although to be fair he did have a habit of eating his own brood). His remains just happen to reside in a casket that bears a strong resemblance to Raiders’ ark (Titan himself is more you standard issue demonic horned god type, when he is mustered). To complete this task Luke requires the Golden Fleece, a rather non-descript piece of rug here but one with the handy power to heal pretty much anything and everything. In turn, Percy requires it to save the tree that protects Camp Half-Blood (there’s a first draft site name if ever there was one).

The Fleece is guarded over by Polyphemus the Cyclops, who for some reason now lives on Circe’s island. In the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. This mish-mash might have been all right if used to blend elements into an inventive melange, but the result is consistently limp. On the plus side there’s a whacky car journey with the Graeae that is at least lively. It takes the one-eyed sisters and sticks them in a demonic taxicab that could be an outtake from Bill Murray’s Scrooged. The insides of Charybdis seem to have been half-inspired by Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen, but such inventiveness is few and far between.

It’s nice to see a hippocampus, but why is it even necessary when Percy is travelling across water… which he has command over? The special effects aren’t so special either, especially for a movie that reportedly wasn’t that cheap, as if all designers just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm. And that’s Sea of Monsters all over. It’s okay, and there’s at least more life than in those dismayingly charmless Sam Worthington Perseus flicks, but its still quite sad to see such rich material wasted so profusely.

Sea of Monsters didn’t do that much less business than the first so, with a fourth Narnia tentatively planned, The Titan’s Curse may well follow. But if this series does, just about, continue to make sense financially, at some point the producers will be forced to recast, drastically reduce the budgets (they may well end up as straight-to-DVD fare), or even reboot it in a TV incarnation. To realistically ride the crest of the Potter wave Percy needed to become a movie series almost as soon as its 2005 novel debut, not five years later. As I understand it, the Jackson faithful aren’t that keen on the way the makers keep messing with the books, giving the movies even less reason to be. This is a series where it’s left to the supporting characters maintain the interest and where the myths are so neutered as to be virtually unrecognisable. Also, the title’s misleading. I could only count one (monster).

**1/2

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog